Documenting Aftermath

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Documenting Aftermath

Author : Megan Finn
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262552752
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Documenting Aftermath by : Megan Finn

Download or read book Documenting Aftermath written by Megan Finn and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-07-23 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of how changing public information infrastructures shaped people's experience of earthquakes in Northern California in 1868, 1906, and 1989. When an earthquake happens in California today, residents may look to the United States Geological Survey for online maps that show the quake's epicenter, turn to Twitter for government bulletins and the latest news, check Facebook for updates from friends and family, and count on help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). One hundred and fifty years ago, however, FEMA and other government agencies did not exist, and information came by telegraph and newspaper. In Documenting Aftermath, Megan Finn explores changing public information infrastructures and how they shaped people's experience of disaster, examining postearthquake information and communication practices in three Northern California earthquakes: the 1868 Hayward Fault earthquake, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. She then analyzes the institutions, policies, and technologies that shape today's postdisaster information landscape. Finn argues that information orders—complex constellations of institutions, technologies, and practices—influence how we act in, experience, and document events. What Finn terms event epistemologies, constituted both by historical documents and by researchers who study them, explain how information orders facilitate particular possibilities for knowledge. After the 1868 earthquake, the Chamber of Commerce telegraphed reassurances to out-of-state investors while local newspapers ran sensational earthquake narratives; in 1906, families and institutions used innovative techniques for locating people; and in 1989, government institutions and the media developed a symbiotic relationship in information dissemination. Today, government disaster response plans and new media platforms imagine different sources of informational authority yet work together shaping disaster narratives.

Doing Document Analysis

Author : Kristin Asdal
Publisher : SAGE
ISBN 13 : 1529764653
Total Pages : 213 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (297 download)

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Book Synopsis Doing Document Analysis by : Kristin Asdal

Download or read book Doing Document Analysis written by Kristin Asdal and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2021-12-08 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uniting methods from disciplines across the social sciences and humanities, this hands-on guide develops a novel approach to doing document analysis. The authors present a framework for studying documents that enables you to conduct a rich and systematic analysis of documents in all their diversity. Focussing on document analysis both in practice and as practice, the book provides you with an innovative and versatile toolkit for analysing print and digital documents. It also: Highlights the impacts of digitalisation on documents themselves and the methods used to study them Has a strong focus on research ethics and critical engagement with digital sources Offers practical guidance on preparing and doing a document analysis research project. The book offers insightful perspectives both on the indispensable role of documents in our society and practical advice on how you can best analyse documents and their significance.

Remaking Berlin

Author : Timothy Moss
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262360896
Total Pages : 473 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis Remaking Berlin by : Timothy Moss

Download or read book Remaking Berlin written by Timothy Moss and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of Berlin's turbulent history through the lens of its water and energy infrastructures. In Remaking Berlin, Timothy Moss takes a novel perspective on Berlin's turbulent twentieth-century history, examining it through the lens of its water and energy infrastructures. He shows that, through a century of changing regimes, geopolitical interventions, and socioeconomic volatility, Berlin's networked urban infrastructures have acted as medium and manifestation of municipal, national, and international politics and policies. Moss traces the coevolution of Berlin and its infrastructure systems from the creation of Greater Berlin in 1920 to remunicipalization of services in 2020, encompassing democratic, fascist, and socialist regimes.

The Connectivity of Things

Author : Sebastian Giessmann
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262381087
Total Pages : 445 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis The Connectivity of Things by : Sebastian Giessmann

Download or read book The Connectivity of Things written by Sebastian Giessmann and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A media history of the material and infrastructural features of networking practices, a German classic translated for the first time into English. Nets hold, connect, and catch. They ensnare, bind, and entangle. Our social networks owe their name to a conceivably strange and ambivalent object. But how did the net get into the network? And how can it reasonably represent the connectedness of people, things, institutions, signs, infrastructures, and even nature? The Connectivity of Things by Sebastian Giessmann, the first media history that addresses the overwhelming diversity of networks, attempts to answer all these questions and more. Reconstructing the decisive moments in which networking turned into a veritable cultural technique, Giessmann takes readers below the street to the Parisian sewers and to the Suez Canal, into the telephone exchanges of Northeast America, and on to the London Underground. His brilliant history explains why social networks were discovered late, how the rapid rise of mathematical network theory was able to take place, how improbable the invention of the internet was, and even what diagrams and conspiracy theories have to do with it all. A primer on networking as a cultural technique, this translated German classic explains everything one ever could wish to know about networks.

Letters, Power Lines, and Other Dangerous Things

Author : Ryan Ellis
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262538547
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Letters, Power Lines, and Other Dangerous Things by : Ryan Ellis

Download or read book Letters, Power Lines, and Other Dangerous Things written by Ryan Ellis and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of how post-9/11 security concerns have transformed the public view and governance of infrastructure. After September 11, 2001, infrastructures—the mundane systems that undergird much of modern life—were suddenly considered “soft targets” that required immediate security enhancements. Infrastructure protection quickly became the multibillion dollar core of a new and expansive homeland security mission. In this book, Ryan Ellis examines how the long shadow of post-9/11 security concerns have remade and reordered infrastructure, arguing that it has been a stunning transformation. Ellis describes the way workers, civic groups, city councils, bureaucrats, and others used the threat of terrorism as a political resource, taking the opportunity not only to address security vulnerabilities but also to reassert a degree of public control over infrastructure. Nearly two decades after September 11, the threat of terrorism remains etched into the inner workings of infrastructures through new laws, regulations, technologies, and practices. Ellis maps these changes through an examination of three U.S. infrastructures: the postal system, the freight rail network, and the electric power grid. He describes, for example, how debates about protecting the mail from anthrax and other biological hazards spiraled into larger arguments over worker rights, the power of large-volume mailers, and the fortunes of old media in a new media world; how environmental activists leveraged post-9/11 security fears over shipments of hazardous materials to take on the rail industry and the chemical lobby; and how otherwise marginal federal regulators parlayed new mandatory cybersecurity standards for the electric power industry into a robust system of accountability.

The Charisma Machine

Author : Morgan G. Ames
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262537443
Total Pages : 323 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis The Charisma Machine by : Morgan G. Ames

Download or read book The Charisma Machine written by Morgan G. Ames and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating examination of technological utopianism and its complicated consequences. In The Charisma Machine, Morgan Ames chronicles the life and legacy of the One Laptop per Child project and explains why—despite its failures—the same utopian visions that inspired OLPC still motivate other projects trying to use technology to “disrupt” education and development. Announced in 2005 by MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop per Child promised to transform the lives of children across the Global South with a small, sturdy, and cheap laptop computer, powered by a hand crank. In reality, the project fell short in many ways—starting with the hand crank, which never materialized. Yet the project remained charismatic to many who were captivated by its claims of access to educational opportunities previously out of reach. Behind its promises, OLPC, like many technology projects that make similarly grand claims, had a fundamentally flawed vision of who the computer was made for and what role technology should play in learning. Drawing on fifty years of history and a seven-month study of a model OLPC project in Paraguay, Ames reveals that the laptops were not only frustrating to use, easy to break, and hard to repair, they were designed for “technically precocious boys”—idealized younger versions of the developers themselves—rather than the children who were actually using them. The Charisma Machine offers a cautionary tale about the allure of technology hype and the problems that result when utopian dreams drive technology development.

Infrastructural Brutalism

Author : Michael Truscello
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262358727
Total Pages : 378 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis Infrastructural Brutalism by : Michael Truscello

Download or read book Infrastructural Brutalism written by Michael Truscello and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How "drowned town" literature, road movies, energy landscape photography, and "death train" narratives represent the brutality of industrial infrastructures. In this book, Michael Truscello looks at the industrial infrastructure not as an invisible system of connectivity and mobility that keeps capitalism humming in the background but as a manufactured miasma of despair, toxicity, and death. Truscello terms this "infrastructural brutalism"--a formulation that not only alludes to the historical nexus of infrastructure and the concrete aesthetic of Brutalist architecture but also describes the ecological, political, and psychological brutality of industrial infrastructures.

Repairing Infrastructures

Author : Christopher R. Henke
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262539705
Total Pages : 211 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Repairing Infrastructures by : Christopher R. Henke

Download or read book Repairing Infrastructures written by Christopher R. Henke and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Infrastructures—communication, food, transportation, energy, and information—are all around us, and their enduring function and influence depend on the constant work of repair. In this book, Christopher Henke and Benjamin Sims explore the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Henke and Sims offer examples, from local to global, to investigate not only the role of repair in maintaining infrastructures themselves but also the social and political orders that are created and sustained through them. Repair can encompass not only the kind of work we most commonly associate with the term but also any set of practices aimed at restoring a sense of normalcy or credibility to the places and institutions we inhabit in everyday life. From cases as diverse as the repair of building systems on a university campus, a conflict over retrofitting a bridge while protecting murals painted on it, and the global challenge posed by climate change, Henke and Sims assemble a range of examples to illustrate key conceptual points about the role of repair. They show that repair is an essential if often overlooked aspect of understanding the broader impact and politics of infrastructures. Understanding repair helps us better understand infrastructures and the scope of their influence on our lives.

The Book Proposal Book

Author : Laura Portwood-Stacer
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691209677
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

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Book Synopsis The Book Proposal Book by : Laura Portwood-Stacer

Download or read book The Book Proposal Book written by Laura Portwood-Stacer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Book Proposal Book: A Guide for Scholarly Authors is not just a compendium of abstract advice; it's a structured program-complete with worksheets and concrete tasks-that takes readers through each step of researching and writing a proposal that will sell their book to an editor at a scholarly press. The handbook is premised on the fact that an effective proposal doesn't merely describe a book project-it makes an active case that the manuscript should exist in published form because it has the potential to reach and appeal to actual readers. The Book Proposal Book works though the implications of this premise, showing authors how a focus on audience and usability must inform every element of their pitch. Readers of this handbook will learn how to both write a complete book proposal and confidently navigate the scholarly publishing process from pitch to contract to publication. Moreover, they will gain invaluable insight into their own research and the message they want to share with the world"--

Energy at the End of the World

Author : Laura Watts
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262349663
Total Pages : 441 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis Energy at the End of the World by : Laura Watts

Download or read book Energy at the End of the World written by Laura Watts and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making local energy futures, from marine energy to hydrogen fuel, at the edge of the world. The islands of Orkney, off the northern coast of Scotland, are closer to the Arctic Circle than to London. Surrounded by fierce seas and shrouded by clouds and mist, the islands seem to mark the edge of the known world. And yet they are a center for energy technology innovation, from marine energy to hydrogen fuel networks, attracting the interest of venture capitalists and local communities. In this book, Laura Watts tells a story of making energy futures at the edge of the world. Orkney, Watts tells us, has been making technology for six thousand years, from arrowheads and stone circles to wave and tide energy prototypes. Artifacts and traces of all the ages—Stone, Bronze, Iron, Viking, Silicon—are visible everywhere. The islanders turned to energy innovation when forced to contend with an energy infrastructure they had outgrown. Today, Orkney is home to the European Marine Energy Centre, established in 2003. There are about forty open-sea marine energy test facilities in the world, many of which draw on Orkney expertise. The islands generate more renewable energy than they use, are growing hydrogen fuel and electric car networks, and have hundreds of locally owned micro wind turbines and a decade-old smart grid. Mixing storytelling and ethnography, empiricism and lyricism, Watts tells an Orkney energy saga—an account of how the islands are creating their own low-carbon future in the face of the seemingly impossible. The Orkney Islands, Watts shows, are playing a long game, making energy futures for another six thousand years.

Proxies

Author : Dylan Mulvin
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262045141
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (62 download)

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Book Synopsis Proxies by : Dylan Mulvin

Download or read book Proxies written by Dylan Mulvin and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How those with the power to design technology, in the very moment of design, are allowed to imagine who is included--and who is excluded--in the future. Our world is built on an array of standards we are compelled to share. In Proxies, Dylan Mulvin examines how we arrive at those standards, asking, "To whom and to what do we delegate the power to stand in for the world?" Mulvin shows how those with the power to design technology, in the very moment of design, are allowed to imagine who is included--and who is excluded--in the future. For designers of technology, some bits of the world end up standing in for other bits, standards with which they build and calibrate. These "proxies" carry specific values, even as they disappear from view. Mulvin explores the ways technologies, standards, and infrastructures inescapably reflect the cultural milieus of their bureaucratic homes. Drawing on archival research, he investigates some of the basic building-blocks of our shared infrastructures. He tells the history of technology through the labor and communal practices of, among others, the people who clean kilograms to make the metric system run, the women who pose as test images, and the actors who embody disease and disability for medical students. Each case maps the ways standards and infrastructure rely on prototypical ideas of whiteness, able-bodiedness, and purity to control and contain the messiness of reality. Standards and infrastructures, Mulvin argues, shape and distort the possibilities of representation, the meaning of difference, and the levers of change and social justice.

Gaming the Metrics

Author : Mario Biagioli
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262356570
Total Pages : 307 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis Gaming the Metrics by : Mario Biagioli

Download or read book Gaming the Metrics written by Mario Biagioli and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the increasing reliance on metrics to evaluate scholarly publications has produced new forms of academic fraud and misconduct. The traditional academic imperative to “publish or perish” is increasingly coupled with the newer necessity of “impact or perish”—the requirement that a publication have “impact,” as measured by a variety of metrics, including citations, views, and downloads. Gaming the Metrics examines how the increasing reliance on metrics to evaluate scholarly publications has produced radically new forms of academic fraud and misconduct. The contributors show that the metrics-based “audit culture” has changed the ecology of research, fostering the gaming and manipulation of quantitative indicators, which lead to the invention of such novel forms of misconduct as citation rings and variously rigged peer reviews. The chapters, written by both scholars and those in the trenches of academic publication, provide a map of academic fraud and misconduct today. They consider such topics as the shortcomings of metrics, the gaming of impact factors, the emergence of so-called predatory journals, the “salami slicing” of scientific findings, the rigging of global university rankings, and the creation of new watchdogs and forensic practices.

The Demonstration Society

Author : Claude Rosental
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262542897
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis The Demonstration Society by : Claude Rosental

Download or read book The Demonstration Society written by Claude Rosental and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, as in the past, public demonstrations are not only tools to prove, persuade, and promote, but also fundamental forms of social interaction and exchange. YouTube demos of makeup products by famous influencers, demonstrations of strength during street protests, demonstrations of military might in North Korea: public demonstrations are omnipresent in social life. Yet they are often perceived as isolated events, unworthy of systematic examination. In The Demonstration Society, Claude Rosental explores the underlying dynamics of what he calls a “demonstration society.” He shows how, both in today’s world and historically, public demonstrations constitute not only tools to prove, persuade, and promote, but fundamental forms of interaction and exchange, and, in some cases, attempts to lead the world. Rosental compares demos with other forms of public demonstrations, drawing out both their peculiarities and common features. He analyzes the processes through which demonstrations are conceived and carried out, as well as the skills of their producers. He also compares contemporary demos with historical demonstrations including theaters of machines in the Renaissance, public demonstrations of natural philosophy in the seventeenth century, and demonstrations of the magic lantern in the nineteenth century. Above and beyond the entertainment they sometimes provide, demonstrations are experienced as intense moments that broadly involve alliances, material and symbolic goods, and, more generally, the future of individuals and collectives. Rosental elucidates the many ways in which we live today, as in the past, in a society of demonstration.

A Billion Little Pieces

Author : Jordan Frith
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262551284
Total Pages : 333 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis A Billion Little Pieces by : Jordan Frith

Download or read book A Billion Little Pieces written by Jordan Frith and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-02-06 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How RFID, a ubiquitous but often invisible mobile technology, identifies tens of billions of objects as they move through the world. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is ubiquitous but often invisible, a mobile technology used by more people more often than any flashy smartphone app. RFID systems use radio waves to communicate identifying information, transmitting data from a tag that carries data to a reader that accesses the data. RFID tags can be found in credit cards, passports, key fobs, car windshields, subway passes, consumer electronics, tunnel walls, and even human and animal bodies—identifying tens of billions of objects as they move through the world. In this book, Jordan Frith looks at RFID technology and its social impact, bringing into focus a technology that was designed not to be noticed. RFID, with its ability to collect unique information about almost any material object, has been hyped as the most important identification technology since the bar code, the linchpin of the Internet of Things—and also seen (by some evangelical Christians) as a harbinger of the end times. Frith views RFID as an infrastructure of identification that simultaneously functions as an infrastructure of communication. He uses RFID to examine such larger issues as big data, privacy, and surveillance, giving specificity to debates about societal trends. Frith describes how RFID can monitor hand washing in hospitals, change supply chain logistics, communicate wine vintages, and identify rescued pets. He offers an accessible explanation of the technology, looks at privacy concerns, and pushes back against alarmist accounts that exaggerate RFID's capabilities. The increasingly granular practices of identification enabled by RFID and other identification technologies, Frith argues, have become essential to the working of contemporary networks, reshaping the ways we use information.

In Case of Emergency

Author : Elizabeth Ellcessor
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479811661
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (798 download)

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Book Synopsis In Case of Emergency by : Elizabeth Ellcessor

Download or read book In Case of Emergency written by Elizabeth Ellcessor and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A much-needed look at the growth of emergency media and its impact on our lives In an emergency, we often look to media: to contact authorities, to get help, to monitor evolving situations, or to reach out to our loved ones. Sometimes we aren’t even aware of an emergency until we are notified by one of the countless alerts, alarms, notifications, sirens, text messages, or phone calls that permeate everyday life. Yet most people have only a partial understanding of how such systems make sense of and act upon an “emergency.” In Case of Emergency argues that emergency media are profoundly cultural artifacts that shape the very definition of “emergency” as an opposite of “normal.” Looking broadly across a range of contemporary emergency-related devices, practices, and services, Elizabeth Ellcessor illuminates the cultural and political underpinnings and socially differential effects of emergency media. By interweaving in-depth interviews with emergency-operation and app-development experts, archival materials, and discursive and technological readings of hardware and infrastructures, Ellcessor demonstrates that emergency media are powerful components of American life that are rarely, if ever, neutral. The normalization of ideologies produced and reinforced by emergency media result in unequal access to emergency services and discriminatory assumptions about who or what is a threat and who deserves care and protection. As emergency media undergo massive growth and transformation in response to digitization and attendant entrepreneurial cultures, Ellcessor asks where access, equity, and accountability fit in all of this. The first book to develop a typology of emergency media, In Case of Emergency opens a much-needed conversation around the larger cultural meanings of “emergency,” and what an ethical and care-based approach to emergency could entail.

¡Alerta!

Author : Elizabeth Reddy
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262545519
Total Pages : 227 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis ¡Alerta! by : Elizabeth Reddy

Download or read book ¡Alerta! written by Elizabeth Reddy and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively account of a controversial technology developed to mitigate earthquake risk and change how we live with threatening environments. The Sistema de Alerta Sísmica Mexicano is the world’s oldest public earthquake early warning system. Given the unpredictability of earthquakes, the technology was designed to give the people of Mexico City more than a minute to prepare before the next big quake hits. How does this kind of environmental monitoring technology get built in the first place? How does its life-saving promise align with reality? And who shapes modern risk mitigation? In ¡Alerta!, Elizabeth Reddy surveys this innovation to shed light on what it means to imagine a world where sirens could sound out an ¡alerta sísmica! at any moment—and what it would be like to live in such a world. Proponents of earthquake early warnings have long held that the technology can save lives and limit economic losses. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival data, Reddy conducts a thorough, qualitative analysis of these claims and considers the requirements and uses of the alert system. She embeds her study in a rich narrative of the engineers who designed the system in conjunction with contingent political and environmental conditions. The result demonstrates how addressing earthquake dangers is no small task: it means trying to change relationships between the environment, society, and technology. Doing so, she critiques universalist and techno-centric approaches to hazard risk mitigation and celebrates the potential of contextually appropriate and broadly supported efforts. ¡Alerta! takes readers on a vivid journey into the world of Mexican earthquake risk mitigation, with critical insights for anthropologists and science and technology studies scholars, as well as specialists in the geosciences, engineering, and emergency management.

Patching Development

Author : Rajesh Veeraraghavan
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0197567819
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (975 download)

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Book Synopsis Patching Development by : Rajesh Veeraraghavan

Download or read book Patching Development written by Rajesh Veeraraghavan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diving into an original and unusually positive case study from India, Patching Development shows how development programs can be designed to work. How can development programs deliver benefits to marginalized citizens in ways that expand their rights and freedoms? Political will and good policy design are critical but often insufficient due to resistance from entrenched local power systems. In Patching Development, Rajesh Veeraraghavan presents an ethnography of one of the largest development programs in the world, the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), and examines NREGA's implementation in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. He finds that the local system of power is extremely difficult to transform, not because of inertia, but because of coercive counter strategy from actors at the last mile and their ability to exploit information asymmetries. Upper-level NREGA bureaucrats in Andhra Pradesh do not possess the capacity to change the power axis through direct confrontation with local elites, but instead have relied on a continuous series of responses that react to local implementation and information, a process of patching development. Patching development is a top-down, fine-grained, iterative socio-technical process that makes local information about implementation visible through technology and enlists participation from marginalized citizens through social audits. These processes are neither neat nor orderly and have led to a contentious sphere where the exercise of power over documents, institutions and technology is intricate, fluid and highly situated. A highly original account with global significance, this book casts new light on the challenges and benefits of using information and technology in novel ways to implement development programs.