[ecrea] Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media

A new publication from University Of Minnesota Press

Free postage to UK customers

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/code-and-clay-data-and-dirt **

**

*Code and Clay, Data and Dirt***

*Five Thousand Years of Urban Media***

/Shannon Mattern///

    "/Code and Clay, Data and Dirt/ has style and method, originality 
and purpose. Each dig into this exceptional work has brought pleasure 
and scholarly respect."—Malcolm McCullough, author of /Digital Ground/

"/Code and Clay, Data and Dirt/ is a vital new contribution to media 
archaeology. Using multisensory, archival, and speculative methods, this 
book’s riveting journey through the deep time of media explores how 
cities inscribe, transmit, perform, and reverberate. Responding to the 
current fascination with big data and smart cities, Shannon Mattern 
powerfully demonstrates that cities have always been sites of urban 
intelligence."—Lisa Parks, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"This is highly synthetic and sophisticated work, and Shannon Mattern is 
generous to her readers, serving as an informed guide to a complex past. 
She pushes us to a rich archaeological encounter with the layered 
presence of the past, as well as its vanished remains and traces, to 
think about ways of reading the world in its full artifactuality. The 
book is a wonderfully vivid account and analysis of the intersections of 
media technologies and urban landscapes."—Johanna Drucker, University of 
California, Los Angeles

For years, pundits have trumpeted the earthshattering changes that big 
data and smart networks will soon bring to our cities. But what if 
cities have long been built for intelligence, maybe for millennia? In 
/Code and Clay, Data/ and Dirt Shannon Mattern advances the provocative 
argument that our urban spaces have been “smart” and mediated for 
thousands of years.

Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, /Code and Clay, 
Data and Dirt/ goes far beyond the standard historical concepts of 
origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite 
few. Mattern shows that in their architecture, laws, street layouts, and 
civic knowledge—and through technologies including the telephone, 
telegraph, radio, printing, writing, and even the human voice—cities 
have long negotiated a rich exchange between analog and digital, code 
and clay, data and dirt, ether and ore.

Mattern’s vivid prose takes readers through a historically and 
geographically broad range of stories, scenes, and locations, 
synthesizing a new narrative for our urban spaces. Taking media 
archaeology to the city’s streets, /Code and Clay, Data and Dirt/ 
reveals new ways to write our urban, media, and cultural histories.

*Shannon Mattern*is associate professor in the School of Media Studies 
at The New School in New York. She is author of /The New Downtown 
Library: Designing with Communities/ and /Deep Mapping the Media City/, 
both from Minnesota.

University Of Minnesota Press | November 2017| 288pp | 9781517902445 | 
Paperback | £21.99*

20% discount with this code: CSL1117CCDD**

*Price subject to change.

  **Offer excludes North & South America , Australia, New Zealand & Japan


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